PaulSacramento wrote:Jac,
You seem to be stating that evil is anything outside a "standard of Good".
Again, it depends on how you are using the phrase "standard of good." Your term "outside" makes me think you still aren't seeing what I'm saying. What I
am syaing is that evil is anything
deficient of a good (where the good is intrinsic to the nature of a thing -- again, blindness is evil in humans, but not in rocks).
Honestly, I am not sure I can agree with that.
That's because you and I don't agree on what "good" means, which I said to you a long time ago. That's why I asked you the question I did that you didn't bother answering.
Evil seems to me to be a deliberate and conscious act that is malicious.
Sure, if we are only talking about moral evil, but then you're just begging the question, since the entire discussion here has been about the existence of natural evil. But worse, that's not even a good definition of moral evil. Plenty of things are morally evil that are not intended to be malicious. Homosexual intercourse, getting drunk (or high or any other such thing), denying the existence of God, etc.
A person that falls down the stairs because they tripped on a toy that their 3 year old forgot to put away and breaks their leg and ends up losing their leg to an infection from that break, did NOT lose their leg to any sort of evil IMO, do you disagree?
Depends on how technical you want to get. Suppose the leg had to be amputated due infection. Was it the infection or the amputation that caused the loss of the leg? You can say either one and be correct. It just depends on how strictly you are speaking.
To your question, then, the toy being left out was not evil, nor was the falling down the stairs. The loss of the leg
is evil, because it deprives the person of the good of having both his legs, and with that, he loses a wide range of capacities he had prior to the accident. Since evil, by definition, is the privation of good, and legs are good, then the privation of the leg is an instance of an evil. It is not
moral evil, but no one claims that natural evils are moral evils. What we claim is that evil exists, and natural evils are one type of evil and moral evils are another type of evil, but that all evils have this in common: they are all the deprivation of good.
So until you grasp the definition of "good," you are going to continue to misunderstand and reject the argument. You will then be left with a divine command theory to account for the reality of moral goodness and all the difficulties that entails. You will further have to say that the word "good" when describing things in the non-moral entities (e.g., when God said creation was good, or when I tell my three year old that she did a good job when she sings a song, or any number of other things) is essentially a different word that the word "good" when describing moral behaviors (e.g., being kind). That is, if good is only a matter of morality, then since there is nothing moral about circles, then there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" circle. We may
use the word "good" or "bad," but the usages, for you, are mere equivocations--matters of convention, perhaps metaphors at best, homophones at worst. But see, I don't believe that to be true. For very fundamental reasons I've already sketched out in broad outline, I think "good" applies in a very real way to objects, and that it applies
in the same way to moral behavior. All that is to say, I seem to have a much more robust view of "goodness" than you do.
In short, when I say, "Evil is the deprivation of good," I am saying a
lot, because "good" is a very important and very fundamental term. It corresponds with objective reality because it reflects objective reality. It provides the basis for natural law, which is the basis for ethics. Strip goodness out of the natural universe, then there is no basis for natural law, and if there is no basis for natural law, then we have no objective basis for ethics and are forced (again) to appeal to a divine command theory on one hand or a Platonic ideal of "Moral Good" on the other. But both of those views are incompatible with Christian theism and ought to be rejected.
tl;dr - what Rick said and jlay said. Them boys be much more concise than me.
